(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for managing a wireless network. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for managing a network of a moving wireless mesh network system.
(b) Description of the Related Art
In a wireless cellular network, a terminal performs a handover when a new base station discover a base station witch can provide a link with better channel condition than a serving base station that it is currently connected to is found, that is, a target base station is searched. That is, the terminal is not simultaneously linked to multiple base stations such that the handover is performed to form a link with the target base station and to release a link with the serving base station.
In the wireless cellular network, the target base station must perform the entry and an authentication process with the terminal which performing handover during handover process, and at this time, to support fast handover of the terminal, by receiving terminal information such as identifier, authentication information, and service flow information from the serving base station, a method omitting the connection and the authentication process with the terminal in the handover process is used.
That is, to support the fast handover of the terminal in the cellular network, the serving base station and the target base station are required to be connected reliably through the core network. However, in the wireless mesh network which has mobility, the connectivity among mesh nodes is chaning with time and it is difficult to apply the method for the handover of the wireless cellular network.
In the wireless mesh network, the mesh node may have mobility, and when a new mesh node enters a transmission range, a process of forming the link with the new mesh node is required, while when the neighboring mesh node is moved outside the transmission range, a process to delete the link with the corresponding mesh node is required.
In the link formation process of the wireless mesh network based on a wireless local area network (WLAN), two mesh nodes respectively become an authentication requestor (supplicant) and an authentication licenser (authenticator) through mutual role negotiation to perform the authentication process while following an 802.11i authentication process. The 802.11i authentication process requires communication between the authenticator and the central authentication server, and therefore the link formation time is relatively increased.
Also, when deleting the link with the neighboring mesh node in the wireless mesh network, traffic been delivered through the corresponding mesh node need to be delivered to a different neighboring mesh node and this is determined by a routing table. In the wireless mesh network in the prior art, fixed end-to-end path for data delivery is not used, and therefore path adjustment for the deleted link is not required for this.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.